How do I get the length of a string in Perl?

length($string)

perldoc -f length

   length EXPR
   length  Returns the length in characters of the value of EXPR.  If EXPR is
           omitted, returns length of $_.  Note that this cannot be used on an
           entire array or hash to find out how many elements these have.  For
           that, use "scalar @array" and "scalar keys %hash" respectively.

           Note the characters: if the EXPR is in Unicode, you will get the num-
           ber of characters, not the number of bytes.  To get the length in
           bytes, use "do { use bytes; length(EXPR) }", see bytes.